My goal was to develop a suitably polished app that I could publish on the Google Play Store before applying for developer internship positions in central London. I have now done this (ta da!), and the app is called strollCharlton.

The idea of a local area guide for Charlton (where we now live) came from a three year old plan to do a London wide tourist guide app that wasn’t just full of marketing guff, but that actually contained useful and interesting information.

We got as far as deciding on a name related to walking that hadn’t been overly used, and I started writing a bit of content for some places in Greenwich (where we lived then), but that was it… cut to three years later and I did it at last. Hooray for me!

The app itself combines a number of my pre-Android interests – I’ve been writing blogs, essays, work instructions and client facing emails for many years, and I’ve always had an eye for design (plus a GCSE in Graphics and an A2-Level in Design Studies – those things are always integral to life!), so it was quite fun to develop, and it has obvious potential for repurposing to another location.

strollCharlton is free to download and I would appreciate any feedback and/or reviews.

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Thanks to my husband’s mini programming library, plus the power of Google, I have a good number of ‘go to’ Java and Android resources. See below for my recommendations.

And for an excellent summation of how Java is applied when developing Android apps, the two part Java Basics for Android Development blog, by Ben Jakuben at Treehouse, is worth a thorough read.